Captain Newmarch was a bilious Englishman with a thin, scrawny beard.  He endeavoured to make one word do the work of two—­or three if they were very short words—­and working up a conversation with him was as tough a job as one could lay hold of.  Sometimes a word came to the tip of his tongue, felt the atmosphere, as you might say, then slid back into his throat with a little protesting gurgle, and after a ten minutes’ conversation with him, those little gurgles from the strangled words made me look upon him as a sort of morgue for murdered sentences.

Professor Herndon, the head of the expedition, was on the deck when the captain and I came up out of the cabin, and Herndon was everything the comic papers show in the make-up of science professors, with a little bit extra for good luck.  He was sixty inches of nerves, wrinkles, and whiskers, with special adornments in the shape of a blue smoking cap, and a pair of spectacles with specially ground lenses of an enormous thickness.

Newmarch grunted something which the Professor and I took to be an introduction, and he put a skinny hand into mine.

“You have been a long while in the Islands?” he squeaked.

“Longer than I care to say,” I replied.

“Have you been around the spot we are making for?” he asked.

“I was on Penrhyn Island for three months,” I answered.  “I was helping a German scientist who was studying the family habits of turtles.”

I made a foolish break by admitting that I possessed any knowledge of Polynesia.  The Professor had left his home at sunny Sausalito, on the shores of San Francisco Bay, in search of that kind of stuff, and before I could do a conversational backstep he had pushed me against the side of the galley and was deluging me with questions, the answers to which he entered in shorthand in a notebook that was bulkier than a Dutchman’s Bible.  The old spectacled ancient could fire more queries in three minutes than any human gatling that ever gripped a brief, and I looked around for relief.

And the wonder is that the relief came.  I forgot the Professor and his anxiety concerning the “temba-temba” devil dance when my eyes happened to catch sight of the vision that was approaching from the companionway.  A boat carrying a science expedition to one of the loneliest groups in the Pacific was not the place where one would expect to find the handsomest girl in all the world, and my tongue refused to mould my words.  The girl was tall, of graceful build, and possessed of a quiet beauty that had a most peculiar effect upon me.  Only that afternoon, as I lay in the shadow of the pile of pearl shell on Levuka wharf, I had thought of crossing to Auckland and shipping up to ’Frisco so that I could hear good women laugh and talk as I had heard them in my dreams during the years I had spent around the Islands, and now the woman of my dreams was in front of me.  But I was afraid of her.  When she came toward me I thought of the years I had wasted down in that lonely quarter where ambition is strangled by lassitude bred in tropical sunshine, and the ghost of the man I might have been banged me fair between the two eyes.